(click on pictures to get closer view)
Rainer Fuchs:
The furniture stands before It and the picture hangs above It
A fundamental aspect of the work of Thomas Jocher is a consideration
of the fact that conventional pictures like the ones hanging on
the walls of our homes do not only preserve and tell stories but
also serve as furniture within those spaces, thus projecting an
iconography of practical utility beyond their specific pictorial
contents. Just as, conversely, the pieces of furniture themselves
appear to shed their roles of pure functionality, aspiring, through
their decor and design, to the status of objects of art and the
representation of styles. Baroque pieces of furniture, for instance,
with their sumptuous cloth coverings and ornamental body may well
appear to be a  symbiotic crossover of pictorial and sculptural forms whose character
as works of art is enhanced even more if their ordinary employment
as seats has been replaced by their being taken into possession
as collectors' items. In this fashion, both artful objects of
daily use and objects of art simply used are continuously juxtaposed,
creating that specific home-like atmosphere where the permanent
exchange of roles between, and reflections upon, art and life,
of complex meanings and banal functions, take place.
But once the picture has been recognized as something on the wall
among other things, that circumstance will henceforth become imprinted
on it as an integral part of the picture's meaning, of its content,
quite apart from the subject matter otherwise depicted in it.
To view a picture's narrative component and iconographical details
not as its primary content means that what is chiefly addressed
as its content will be the fact of its being exhibited and mounted
on a wall. This does, however, also give way to the possibility
of inquiring into the objectivity of a picture thus liberated
of illumined objects. And it is within this process of objectivation
that Jochers work moves, though neither to proclaim, whether in
the sense of some linear development, the end of pictorial depiction,
nor in order to employ painting as that picture-making art which
plagiarizes so-called reality. At this point a digression on the
history of the relation between the terms "picture" and "object"
may appear in order, to facilitate describing Jocher's position
within it.
According to the traditional terminology of art history, abstract
pictures are those that do not reproduce any objects in a representational
sense. There is a well-known tradition of interpretation within
the art criticism of our century which claims that the art of
painting was ableonly to arrive at the self-representation of
the medium of painting, or of the means through which it is achieved,
as the genuine coronation of a species of art in its own right,
by renouncing the so-called representation of reality. It is thanks
to Clement Greenberg's Hegelian euphoria that a theory of development
was established according to which the art of painting _ in a
development allegedly triggered by the impressionists who liberated
the brushwork from the task of merely having to describe objects
- could at last, in the abstract expressionism and the color field
painting practiced by the Americans, find the true path to its
inner self. This construction of a self-fulfilling history stemmed
from the criticism of a concept of content orienting itself along
so-called representational and narrative lines, and would run
on into the conviction that the best kind of painting was that
which contained no meaning other than itself. Frank Stella expressed
these ideas with regard to his own work: "My painting is based
on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really
is an object.[...] All I want anyone to get out of my paintings
and all I ever got out of them, is the fact that you can see the
whole idea without any confusion.[...] What you see is what you
see. (1) As a parallel phenomenon of this radical claim, the levelling
of traditional iconographic modes and of their iconological analysis
affected the view of the past shared by historians. The first
involuntary victims of a marginalization or at least of a onesided
writing of art history which also eliminated the subversive and
critical-iconological components of pictorial contents were the
impressionists, who were coopted as precursors of pure painting
Sunday life on the banks of the Seine and figures strolling down
the streets used as subjects of paintings conveyed that laid back
atmosphere and lack of guile amidst an earthly paradise, which
did not appear, intrinsically, to disturb the formalized game
with the brushwork. Proteges of abstraction as, for instance,
Werner Haftmann, helped to make such views accepted: "The whole
of the impressionistic model of life aimed at an unconditional
affirmation of the modem facts of life, a sense of being contemporary
and entering into that joyful, optimistic relationship with nature
which took on the beautiful gleam of this world and considered
the underlying effective forces of nature as [...] the friendly
servants of human progress." _ "There has never been a form of
art which demonstrates such a joyful agreement, stimulated by
all the senses, with the appearance of the world in all its fleeting
momentariness. (2) If the expressionists were still considering
the soullessness of impressionism as a thorn in their sides, the
apologists of pure form were only too happy to accept their alleged
lack of content, i.e., the one-dimensional view presented by the
impressionists, of the world as a "friendly garden " (3)
As becomes clear in Stella's statement regarding the aspired object
character of the painted picture, painting interpreted as a portrait
of itself was only one variant in a reflection in the course of
which the end of the picture and its representation as object
or, alternatively, its supersession by the object, were declared.
To speak of painting meant, even at the beginning of the 1960's,
to refer to matters too heterogeneous to be covered by a single
term and thus to overlook the differences and demarcations, such
as the arguments levelled at their contemporaries by the minimalists
who qualified the former as being traditionalistic and humanistic.
In their attempt to escape the Europeans' relational view of composition,
artists such as Frank Stella and Donald Judd transformed the relationality
within the picture into one between picture and space, thus replacing
the concept of painting by that of the picture, which inscribes
itself as shape and object into the space instead of itself functioning
as a space inscribed and imagined. Judd himself demonstrated that
questions of definition regarding qualitative criteria in art
were able to be regulated by means of a quantitative logic. A
picture, to him, mutated into an object on the wall and ceased
to be a picture, if the measurements of its depth exceeded those
of its length and breadth: "[...] it occurred to me that the idea
would work if they projected
Donald Judd: Untitled (Stacks) 1965
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more than they were wide, top to bottom."(4) The picture thus
squeezed to object format stereometrically and serially purged,
redressed from canvas to metal, in the so-called "stacks" as well
as the picture freely standing up in space, owing to a crease,
are two types of pictures of Judd's that escaped
Donald Judd: Untitled 1962
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painting and which were eventually labelled with the term "object".
From the liberation of color in impressionism via its self- representation
in color field painting to its fusion with the object in the "colorful
thing", a line of argumentation was drawn whose ironic inversion
culminated in Stella's statement, according to which the best
kind of painting was that which left the paint as unaffected as
it came from its container, i.e., in its original and unspoiled
form: "I knew a wise guy who used to make fun of my painting,
but he didn't like the Abstract Expressionists either. He said
they would be good painters if they could keep the paint only
as good as it is in the can. And that's what I tried to do. I
tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can. "(5) The
picture thus defined back into the tube, appears like the negative
of the picture absorbed by the object. Twice threatened by extinction
the picture hasstruck back as from a hidden lair.
Pino Pascali: Il Muro Del Sonno
(Wall of Sleep) 1966
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Pino Pascali had already undertaken a sort of retransformation
of an object into a picture with his "Wall of Sleep", as early
as 1966. Far from such inquiries into the object based on minimalism
and cognitive psychology, Pascali conjured up the poetry of the
materials themselves, which also included, apart from the cushions
used, the language employed in the title of the work. He stuck
to objects which, in any case, already exist. Just as words are
squandered away in the course of speaking and writing as signs
and mere building blocks for composite meanings, so too the individual
cushions are dissolved within the wall which becomes their composite
meaning Yet as objects within a thing they did simultaneously
generate a picture, which, on top of everything else, had also
been painted on. What emerges, however, is not a picture of the
real _ in the sense of a painted illusion - but a real thing itself
which gives the illusion of a picture. True, the cushions curve
out into space, yet only to withdraw all the more completely from
it as segments of a poetic image. The dissolution and the end
of the picture, brought about by the object, proved even in Pascali
to be a reversible and hence invalidated formula. History never
provided linear progressions; these originate entirely from its
interpretation, becoming, themselves, a part of history and tending,
in turn, to lead to all sorts of mix-ups. At whatever time things
may have originated, in the consciousness of the viewer, if not
sooner, they are jammed together into synchronicity. History runs
aground and is trapped in an ambush, from where it can be written
anew and reconstrued. The relation between picture and object,
or from the picture to the object, which was once seen as a progressional
and causal sequence, has led not only to a dissolution of the
picture but also to a restructuring of its very term. This elasticity
describes not only the nature
of the terms, but is equally inherent in what they refer to. Thus,
the picture has not merely been dissolved in the object, but it
has also digested and incorporated into itself the object as its
opponent and has begun to lay claim to an existence as a hybrid
entity.
In his work, Thomas Jocher, as already stated, pursues this dual
nature of the picture as, on the one hand, a medium of illusionized
spaces, and as an object in itself, on the other, without divesting
himself, as an artist, of the representational function. From
the picture as a corporeal entity, which refers back to the human
body and bears a fragmentary memory of it in the contours and
coloring of the pictorial object, down tothe most recent large-formatted
pictures with their alluded and allusive perspectives and spatial
illusions, which manifest viewing as a taking- into-possession
of the body, a topology of the picture, laid out synchronically
within the surface and into space, is deployed in Jocher's work.
 In his early works the painter subverts academically conditioned
illusion painting by placing rosettes and blossoms in the center
of the picture. These forms rest on the surface like logos and
form a variable, duplicable and mutatable basic idiom with their
simple curved forms. The decorative function of the picture frame
and the passepartout stencils seems to have become literally transformed
into pictorial content in the floral logos. The figure of the
stencil has sickered into the picture and emanates from within
as a topic. When Jocher also places individual motifs from old master pieces
_ where he cultivated his technique - as pars-pro- toto into his
pictures, the conceptual basis underlying scheme and stencil also
applies to them. The copying of familiar paintings resembles a
reproduction of an original that has been declared a sign of itself
through innumerous reproductions. To repaint the detail of a whole
means to reduce a known model to a significant sign which, in
its isolated form, has lost its original meaning as it has been
torn from its context. This sign now becomes the logo of the whole.
A totally separate image evolves, an original of the copier, throwing
a telling light on the ever fragmentary interpretations of old
paintings filtered by anticipations. One usually does not proceed
from the originals to the reproductions but rather, conversely,
finds those works in museums which one is familiar with from illustrations.
The more often a picture is reproduced and the better known it
is, the greater its imprint in our consciousness. It thus contributes
to burying and levelling its own complex iconographical and iconological
structures. What one believes to already know is something one
has long lost sight of.
 The discrepancy between the dark background of the picture and
the painted plasticity of the rosettes and the quotes from old
masters make it possible to assert the two-dimensionality of the
image by painting something additional as a contradiction and
to radically subvert it. The spatialization of the sculptural
pictorial bodies -
Jocher's second painterly strategy _ and the painting of circular,
expanding blossoming or cellformed structures subvert the primacy
of the two-dimensional painting and make the process of viewing
one ofcooptation and visual deception. The ornament of the frame
imploded into a schematic rosette only represents one facet of
the inversion of rim and content, context and image. A further
one can be found in the plump plastic cushions serving as pictures.
Here the taut, sumptuously radiant skin curves on the rims like
a plastic rosette, emanating the luster of an ornament that has
become spatial. The frame seems to have become hermetic forming
a picture and to present itself as a image-filling topic only
to disappear from the picture at the same time.
 The phenomenon of a picture functioning as a piece of furniture
as well as that of the frame functioning as part of the content
of the picture also figures as a central motif in Allan McCollum's
oeuvre. He has compared the position of the picture on the wall
with its place within cultural understanding- reflected in the
paintings hanging in our homes: A painting is something that often
hangs over the couch and it was precisely this straightforward
definition that I found missing in this whole formalist debate.
The "laws" of painting are the laws of the world par excellence.
"(6) It is only consistent that McCollum refers to his pictures
as "surrogates" which only play their role as paintings, fading
their content in this, without telling specific stories as a continuation
of iconographic traditions. In these "mute" and "blind" and thus
selfreflective pictures, the frames do not delineate any representations
but rather represent a motif that belongs to the picture. The
pictorial function expressed by and on the picture can generally
be seen as a topic of Jocher's approach. The self- referentiality
of pictures staged by McCollum finds a deviation in Jocher's work
which is geared at the concept and the image of the body as a figure of association.
 The anthropomorphous dimension of the corporealization of the
picture, i.e., the play with the concept of the body, becomes
evident in those objects that resemble an abstract torso. Here
the flesh-colored layer of paint layer alludes to a taut membrane
covering skin, with folds, constrictions and swellings. It seems
natural to associate the corporealization of the picture with
the image of the body. Here reference is made to the human body
without actually depicting it. At the same time the picture is
objectified without its function of representing the other being
relinquished.
If history, its events and interpretations are always considered
and reflected from a present-day perspective, it seems appropriate
to show what at first sight appears to be diverse and diachronous
in a homogenous and synchronous way. In the cushion pictures the
artist only has to apply the paint equally because the play of
light provides the necessary shadows and the plastic form incarnates
reality. By contrast, on the flat canvas only the trick of painting
helps: the deliberate deception with adequate means, which Jocher
does not at all conceal and presents drastically in the sheer
endless repetition of the same forms. The oppressing closeness of the
plump plastic forms and the endless distance alluded to by painting
are indicative of a circumvention of the surface and a picture
both self sufficient and without any references. This results
in the illusion of a modularly structured space where the process
of viewing becomes coopted by the viewer. The pictures now only
function as sections, as segments constructed from the surface,
spatial funnels that do not just attract the eye but also project
their imaginary fields of force into the surrounding room. Like
softly padded dark caves that hinder the intrusion of any standard,
where macro and micro cosmos become one, the pictures also coopt
the viewer's body with their gaze.
This cooptation of the viewer, his or her "integration" into the picture
and the thematization of viewing has been a central motif in Jocher's
oeuvre from the very  outset. In addition to considering pictures as furnishings or
furniture, he also at first used chairs and armchairs for photographic
documentation. These furniture pieces were in a sense offered
to the viewer as a sort of instruction. Such real requisites do
not just serve as standards for images and as the incorporation
of viewing standards. With their padding and curved borders they
also corresponded to the forms of the images to be viewed. Their
body-oriented form implied the subject of the viewer, his or her
body and act of perceiving the pictorial bodies. Since the seats
do not just function as staffage but also the pictures mutate
in relation to them as staffages of viewing, they also determine
the part of the viewer in the game of roles. This game also latches
into the symbiosis of picture and furniture described above. It
thus makes sense to compare the recipient's role with that of
the person consuming monitor pictures - with pictures flowing
in on him or her and coopting the viewer through identification
figures. The modular structure of seemingly endless reproducible
and manipulable building blocks, its binary nature replicating
positive-negative and dark-light effects also recalls monitor-generated
imagery providing us with simulations.
The real integration into the work, i.e., the physical encircling
of the viewer, takes place in those exhibition situations where
benches created by the artist refer to the  paintings in terms of form and color and the fiction of a space
fumed upside out in a sort of real condensate - namely the benches
- is asserted. It also occurs when the abstract pictorial modules
are objectified in the form of plump, flesh-colored balls, scattered
all over the floor of the room. The art that obstructs one's passage
enables us to travel into the picture, if one wants to stick to
this expression here. It also points to a structure within the
oeuvre which never really becomes open to the function of mimetic
depiction. For Jocher depiction means the reflected reference
of individual works to each other. In this sense he repeats the scenario of repetitions and mutations
visible in the works themselves. A motif is played through by the media
of art, generating various types of images. The plaster balls
lying on the floor can be deciphered as materialized output of
a synthesis of flesh-colored pictorial bodies and the imagined
ball forms of painting While moving between the balls one thus
also moves within a total work, whose individual complexes are
connected by the mind in the same way as the individual balls
are rounded up to form a closed work.
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Viewed from close up, the ball obscures its curvature to the eye.
Its surface becomes a plane and its rim extends to form a horizon.
Its form disappears for the eye and one begins to forget it. Such
an image of the ball gives way to a parable recalling the pictures
on the wall and their disappearance when one moves closer to them,
i.e., by becoming accustomed to them, as with those hanging on
the walls in our homes.
(translation: Camilla Nielsen, Tom Appleton)
1) Questions to Stella and Judd - Interview by Bruce Glaser, 1964,
broadcast by WBAI-FM in New York (cited after: Donald Judd, exhibition
catalogue, Kunstverein Hannover, July/August 1970, p.60)
2) Wemer Haftmann: Malerei im 20.Jahrhundert, vol.1, 1. edition
1954, (cited after the 6th edition of 1979, Prestel-Verlag Munich,
p. 18)
3) ibid.
4) Don Judd: An Interview with John Coplans, in: Don Judd, catalogue,
Pasadena Art Museum 1971, p.25.
5) Questions to Stella and Judd, op.cit., p.58.
6) D.A. Robbins: An Interview with Allan McCollum, in: Art Magazine,
October 1985, p.41. (cited after: Anne Rorimer: Allan McCollum
- Systeme Asthetischer und (MassenProduktion, in: Kunsfforum International,
Cologne 1994, vol. 125, Jan./Feb., p.137.
Illustrations:
Donald Judd: Untitled (Stacks) 1965, in: Don Judd, catalogue,
Pasadena Art Museum 1971, p. 13 Donald Judd: Untitled 1962. ibid..,
p. 27 Pino Pascali: II Muro Del Sonno 1966. Museum Modemer Kunst
Wien
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